Artist Highlight - Mengying Yang

1. The Vessel Ablaze examines migrant family structures across shifting social and geographical systems. What drew you to the family as a site where larger systems become visible?

The family is not an isolated sanctuary but a micro-node where macro-structural forces and global capital chains intersect. In Fulin Village, the structural tension between geographic openness and resource scarcity forces grassroots communities into transnational migration as a compensatory strategy. Global economic shifts and rigid border enforcements directly fracture domestic structures into overseas parents and stay-behind kin. When the cost of survival creates linguistic barriers between a mother and her own child, the family ceases to be just a private space; it becomes the most visceral site where systemic displacement is made visible.

2. The work moves through migration, boundaries and collective identity. How do you understand identity when it is constantly being reorganised by place?

Identity is not a fixed essence, but a drifting subjectivity constantly suspended between the pressures of survival and the rigidities of clan orthodoxy. As migrants navigate informal pathways within globalized spaces, their collective and individual identities are forcibly re-engineered by geographical displacement and border apparatuses. In my work, the foot pedals are sculpted into the silhouettes of cross-strait boundary lines. This emphasizes that identity under constant relocation is not a peaceful adaptation, but a traumatic, ongoing reorganization where the self is perpetually fragmented and re-coded by the changing geography.

3. You draw on local folklore and spiritual belief. What did ritual allow you to approach that documentary or narrative language could not?

Documentary language often relies on linear, factual categorization, which risks flattening the complex trauma of diaspora. Conversely, the Fujian "Wangchuan" (Boat Burning) ritual is inherently a symbolic medium capturing absence and return. By "re-engineering" this folk ritual, I can externalize the drifting subjectivity of individuals caught within institutional and clan structures. The ritual provides a symbolic vocabulary where runes, ropes, and ashes interact, generating a profound tension between "sacred integrity" and "fragmented dysfunction". It accesses a spiritual and collective depth that traditional narrative or documentary language fails to register.

4. The title The Vessel Ablaze is vivid and unsettling. What does the vessel hold, and what does it mean for it to be burning?

The "vessel" carries fractured trans-border kinship networks, filled with generational trauma circulated via crimson-dyed faux seawater. "Ablaze" signifies a paradoxical transformation. During the performance, elders and children burn the boat, collectively incinerating traditional clan control. This fire erases institutionalized blood ties, marking a painful but resolute metamorphosis of the individual surviving within these geographical contradictions.

5. Your work uses experimental video and sound. How do you think moving image helps hold fragmented memory?

Migrant memory is never a coherent archive; it is filled with lacunae and sudden muteness, much like the swaying, fraying hemp ropes in the exhibition space that eventually snap. By combining experimental footage with regional folk instrumentation, the sound design shatters standard, linear timelines. We non-linearly collage documentary field recordings with our behavioral theater, such as the dialogue of villagers balancing on the seesaw-boat. The moving image becomes a non-material container. Rather than forging a false narrative wholeness, it accommodates and stabilizes the raw, fractured memory exactly as it was peeled away during displacement.

6. You describe a tension between the exteriorly familiar and the interiorly unfamiliar. How does that tension appear in the work?

This tension translates directly into a visual confrontation between traditional materials and technological theater. On the outside, the work wraps itself in hyper-familiar cultural symbols: traditional Minnan ancestral shrines, couplets celebrating family unity, and ancient spiritual rites. Yet, inside, this comforting exterior is disrupted by a cold, alienated mechanical system—touch sensors, peristaltic pumps, and an endless loop of circulating red seawater. The mechanical hum and the abrasive printing of ancient totems break the silence. The familiar landscape becomes a theater of alienation, exposing how macro-systems objectively dismantle the private sanctuary of blood ties.

7. The project speaks about liminal states. Are you interested in the moment before belonging is formed, after it is broken, or somewhere between the two?

I am focused on the highly turbulent, suspended "in-between" state. The performances took place directly on-site, charting an emotional geography of coastal migration—from the initial wobbling of belonging to the final, heavy departure at the shore. When you watch the villagers rocking on that seesaw-boat, witnessing the hemp rope being sliced in two, you look at the exact threshold where old belonging has been violently fractured but a new identity has not yet arrived. It is a liminal space heavy with the psychological friction of deciding whether to stay behind or to cross over.

8. Your practice is analytical, but also deeply emotional in its subject matter. How do you keep those two modes in balance?

They inform one another. The analytical side comes from long-term fieldwork—using sociology and anthropology to critically unpack how global capital chains physically disrupt East Asian family structures. However, I refuse to let the research die in cold statistics. In the final presentation, the rigid data gives way to social intervention. We invited over forty local villagers and stay-behind residents who lived through these separations to participate. At that moment, the analytical framework steps back, allowing the embodied memories and raw emotions of the community to flow freely and be collectively witnessed.

9. The work involves actors within shifting systems. What role does performance play in making identity visible or unstable?

Performance here is not theatrical fiction; it is a critical, embodied experience. When stay-behind children and village elders participate in the paradoxical ritual of burning the boat, or when villagers step onto a rocking seesaw-boat to share real stories of separation while watching the ropes snap—the performance shifts private trauma into a space of public witness. This physical enactment exposes the structural fragility of blood ties under the pressure of migration systems. It renders identity visible, not as a static label, but as a site of profound instability and ongoing transformation.

10. After watching The Vessel Ablaze, what question do you hope remains with the viewer about family, migration and belonging?

Ultimately, the question echoed across the beach: "To stay, or to leave? And once that hemp rope is cut, what is actually left?" Beyond macro-statistics of border control, I want viewers to confront the vulnerability of the domestic unit. How do human agency and dignity rebuild themselves when traditional networks of care are systematically reduced to ash?